ALoafOfBread

Oh boy. It’s stagflation time

Yep, I came to comment this. Honestly this could be pretty good news for player 2 - getting a jury to convict when the punishment is death will be much, much harder.

Was travelling with some friends in Istanbul. They were pretty inexperienced abroad, so I figured out public transit there, told them what tickets to buy, and we all walked to the ticket machine. There was a big line/crowd, and a guy up front was taking cash and giving people tickets, which he got by scanning a card at the machine. I went first hoping to show my friends what to do - bought my ticket for like €5 or so and ignored the scammer. They all gave the scammer guy like €20 for him to scan his pass and buy them a €5 ticket. Their reasons were “he seemed official” and “I knew it was a scam, but I figured it was just easier to go along with it”.

One thing the lawyer on Opening Arguments (US conlaw/current events podcast, progressive-liberal perspective) says often that rings really true to me is that “Fascism requires lawyers”, and lots of lawyers, to become established. We saw it in Germany and Italy as well - and in other fascist-lite regimes. You need people who know the law and know how to challenge and change those laws in order to take power. Usually, that means selling out & perverting the rule of law in destructive ways.

they HATESss uss. they put the tAriffssss on usss!

but we loves the canadienses! we want them to be our stateses!

NOO! we hates the nassty canadienses. we give them MORE tAriffsss! make them ssuffer!

So glad I made the switch to Mint back when the EoL for win10 was announced. It has “just worked” with a bit of research beforehand. I like it way more than win10 - looks better, feels better, runs everything I want it to (except games with kernel level anticheat, but whatever), hardware is under less strain and PC no longer sounds like a jet engine. No regrets at all.

And, another perk I didn’t hear as much about, it is really easy to automate stuff. For instance, I play CloneHero streaming from my PC on an Nvidia Shield on a controller with a USB dongle plugged into the shield (shield doesn’t do that normally, linux allowed me to connect to the dongle over wifi with a little finagling) and I have it set up to automatically connect to my computer any time it’s plugged in. I also have certain files set to automatically back up to cloud storage with a simple crontab task (automatically repeating tasks are very easy via crontab).

There’s a video somewhere of a documentarian undergoing oxygen deprivation under medical supervision by pumping nitrogen gas into a sealed room while he attempted to solve a simple geometric puzzle (like one for kids, putting the circle in the circular hole, etc). He felt totally fine the entire time but became euphoric and rapidly declined in cognitive ability - to the point where he could no longer solve the puzzle but was very confident that he was doing very well. Iirc he asked when they were going to start the nitrogen at some point. When he was supplied with oxygen he reflected on the experience and said he had no idea anything was wrong.

Now I’m not saying there isn’t something I’m missing or don’t understand regarding suicide/execution by nitrogen, but as far as I understand it, any discomfort occurs after you’ve lost consciousness.

I have a feeling the backlash when states started considering this as an execution method was intended to paint it as less humane than the 3-drug cocktail to propagandize against the death penalty - knowing that if a more humane method were used, the movement against the death penalty would probably lose some supporters. So, they poisoned the well a couple years ago when this conversation first hit the news.

Now, the real argument against the death penalty is that the state shouldn’t have the ability to kill convicts because what is a capital offence can change for arbitrary reasons and the judicial system will wrongly convict people. But a more visceral argument is that execution is painful and cruel - so take away the pain and you lose the folks you’ve persuaded using that argument.

Wow, reddit is actually up 164% since IPO. Did not expect that at all

I might have to try that. I had pi hole set up but my gf couldn’t use facebook so I was politely asked to remove it

Yeah it doesn’t matter - don’t listen to drama fiends. .ml is fine. Lots of people decry it as being a tankie instance. The whole point of federation is you aren’t limited to the content on your instance - just by which instances yours is federated with.

If people or your instance bother you, make another account. Otherwise, just ignore the haters

He did a huge amount of harm to our government. Not quite like this time, where most of what he is doing is outright illegal and is essentially a soft coup, but really bad nonetheless - just mostly aimed at making him money and getting/keeping political power instead of destryoying the country. Much of that was outright illegal, but a lot of it was just breaches of “norms” and “decorum”.

I literally can’t fit it all into one comment, its so much and such a convoluted web of schemes and lies and crimes and support from other politicians/lawyers/the media. And every day was something new. I followed all the legal cases relating to his admin back in the first term - it was hard to keep up with even while it was all happening. Much of the reason he was never charged or indicted for so much of what he did is that you can’t criminally indict a sitting president.

The Mueller investigation into the Trump administration’s conduct with Russian political operatives found that he more than likely illegally colluded with Russia to the detriment of the US and to defraud and disenfranchise voters, but literally couldn’t charge Trump since he was a sitting president - hoping instead that someone would pick up the investigation when he could be charged. It is notable that that investigation produced 37 indictments and 7 convictions/guilty pleas, referred 14 more cases to DoJ for prosecution, and recovered like $48M in misappropriated government funds (the investigation cost $32M, so it was actually profitable). So, this investigation couldn’t prosecute Trump, but 34 people in his administration were indicted and the findings of the report suggested they would have prosecuted Trump if they were legally allowed to. That says all you need to know, IMO.

I don’t even think the majority of American conservatives are on board with most of what’s happening. Some Like almost half are, but they’re especially stupid and usually ideologically oriented to Trump rather than to the traditional brand of US conservatism.